MADISON, Wis. — It probably isn’t surprising that the story of the Ohio State defense and Ryan Shazier’s story are on a parallel course. Like the defense he helps anchor, the sophomore linebacker wasn’t always that good.

After a remarkable season that has swirled around quarterback Braxton Miller and the Ohio State offense, it seemed almost inevitable that fate would eventually whisk the team’s beleaguered defense into the picture when an unbeaten season was on the line.

Kismet also seemed certain to dictate that Shazier would be the guy at the center of the picture when it did.

“I think three times he’s been Big Ten defensive player of the week, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he has another shot,” coach Urban Meyer said. “I mean, that’s how well he’s playing. Really, if you watch the film from early in the year until now, he wasn’t a linebacker in his first few games. He was a guy running around out of control, not leveraging the ball.”

No more. Here’s how Shazier’s day went:

During a grinding game of big-boy football yesterday against Wisconsin, Shazier delivered a brutal hit on Wisconsin running back Melvin Gordon on the Badgers’ first drive of the fourth quarter. After an eternity on the ground, Shazier had to leave the game because of a neck sprain. He had eight tackles at the time, so in a 14-7 game, his loss could have meant the end of an unbeaten season.

It wasn’t, obviously. He was back for the Badgers’ next drive, one that started on the Wisconsin 46-yard line and eventually found itself on the OSU 2. With the Buckeyes still clinging to a seven-point lead, Montee Ball — who had tied the NCAA career touchdown record earlier — was stopped at the 1 on a third-and-2 by Etienne Sabino with 3:44 left.

On a fourth-and-a-foot from the 1, Ball got the ball again, leaped toward the end zone, stretched the ball toward the goal line … and it met Shazier’s fist instead. The ball flew into Ohio State safety Christian Bryant’s hands for what on a normal day would have been the winning play.

“The thing that went through my mind is that somebody needs to make a play and I wasn’t waiting on anybody to make a play,” Shazier said. “I felt like the opportunity was going to come because I watched plenty of film on him, and you know he’s scored plenty of touchdowns. I saw that when he gets around 1 or 2 yards he likes to jump, so once he jumped, I jumped and punched the ball out.”

Remember what I said about fate finding Shazier? He had been there earlier when Ball scored the record-tying touchdown.

But after one of the most incredible goal-line stands in Ohio State history, the defense couldn’t make one stop on the Badgers’ final drive. The Buckeyes went three-and-out and gave the Badgers the ball back on the OSU 41 with 1:33 left. Wisconsin needed nine plays and all but eight seconds to tie the score at 14 and send it into overtime.

Ohio State’s offense got the ball first and scored on two runs each by Miller and Carlos Hyde — a bit of a shock considering how the offense had sputtered most of the game — and then fate came looking for Shazier and the defense again.

Ball ran for 6 yards on the first play, but on the second, a hard-charging Shazier hit Wisconsin quarterback Curt Phillips a millisecond after he threw and rushed him into an incompletion. Ball was hit for a loss by Sabino on the next play, and a blitz that seemed to include half the defenders, including Shazier, forced Phillips into another incompletion that kept the Buckeyes’ unbeaten season alive.

By that point, the drama created by Shazier’s injury was a distant memory.

Another distant memory:

The time when the Ohio State defense didn’t seem good enough to win a game like this.